Jackal
by Assimbya
Summary: AU. Mina searches for a way to survive in a life she did not choose. Sequel to "Windows." Serious warning for depiction of physical and sexual abuse.


The sheet beneath her was smooth and white. Mina ran her palm over its surface, which was familiar to her skin, comprehensible. A few inches from her elbow she could see what must have been old bloodstains - small, perfect circles, like faded rust. She wondered what they might have come from, whose blood they might be. She decided that she did not care.

She could hear everything, she realized - a spider slowly making its way up the corner opposite to her, wind blowing through an open window down the hall, the murmur of women's voices, she did not know how far away. Was this how it would always feel, to experience the world in this new form? It was overwhelming now, more than she thought she could stand.

The Count was touching her hair, laying the length of it out across the pillow. "I want you to always wear it down," he said, "you look even more beautiful like this." A low, contented laugh. "You fought me more effectively than I would have anticipated. I didn't expect you to draw blood."

She glanced up at him, at the thin scratches streaking his forearms and shoulders and the single, purpling bite mark at his wrist. She was not proud to remember herself inflicting those injuries, lashing out in uncontrolled desperation. She turned her head away.

"Don't withdraw from me, Mina," his voice was firm and steady, "I know how little you enjoyed that, and how much pain you are in now. But you knew that I would do this. I made my intentions entirely clear." He paused, in what seemed to her to be a carefully calculated, deliberate fashion. "I thought that you would prefer to be conscious this first time, and able to fight. Otherwise I would have hypnotized you as I did Lucy."

He was right. Mina did not want to tell him so.

"I know you have questions for me. You may ask them now."

With some effort, Mina managed to push herself up, till she was sitting braced against the headboard. Her body was not paralyzingly weak any longer, not as it had been for the past several weeks, while the Count slowly bled her to death. She ached, but her dizziness was gone.

"Do you truly expect me to conduct some sort of interview with you after that?" Sitting up, she was aware again of her dress lying halfway across the room. She fought not to curl her body in, away from his gaze. There was no point, and she would rather not hear him laugh at her modesty.

"Why shouldn't I?"

Fine, then. Let him explain his own enigmas, if he wished to be deliberately and cruelly obtuse. "You called me - before you did this, you called me your jackal. And you'd said, years ago now, that you had made me your beloved, but soon I would be your jackal when you wanted to feed." She found herself stumbling over his words, over the remembrance of hearing his voice for the first time in that quiet room. "What did you mean by that? What are you making me, now?"

The Count smiled, so that she could see his teeth. "There is one pleasure in drinking from men and women who are young, soft, human. This pleasure is sweet but brief, soon a memory. And then there is another pleasure in taking one of those humans and making a predator out of them, a dangerous thing I can keep under my own dominion. As lords used to send out their falcons to hunt and then wait for them to come back to be bound and hooded. The falcon, tamed and trained, is no threat to the one who handles her, however sharp her talons might be." He touched the bite mark she had left on his wrist, his voice easy.

Mina felt a shiver pass through her, and tried to keep her voice even and cutting. "Need you offer one analogy to clarify another?"

He laughed. "Forgive me. It is an old habit, from being raised on didactic texts. I trust my explanation was clear enough, however?"

"Perhaps too clear." She swallowed, hoping that desperation would not gleam through in her tone. "May I have something to wear now?"

"You don't like me looking at you." His voice was light, and she could not hear malice in it. "Maybe I ought to leave you without clothing for a time, until you accustom yourself to it."

Mina felt something snap, and heard her voice come high and shrieking from her throat. "Isn't this enough for you now?" She tried to pull herself from the bed and reach the dress that lay discarded on the floor, but he caught her wrist before she could get there.

"I will not let you speak to me that way."

"You say you imagine me as some sort of captured predator - you can't violate _any _animal like this and expect them not to respond. Haven't you humiliated me sufficiently for one night?"

He hit her, a quick blow at the back of shoulders and she fell, feeling her face against the mattress. "Animals can be tamed. It's little inconvenience for me to hurt you when you disrespect me, and the only one you will ever harm with disobedience is yourself. Heed that, when you feel anger in the future."

Mina breathed, marveling at the new feeling of air in her inhuman body, and did not speak.

"But, as it happens, I agree with you now; this has been enough. Go, put your dress on."

She stood slowly, unsure whether she had won a victory or lost one.

* * *

><p>At dawn, he made her lie down to sleep in the same coffin into which he had nailed her the previous day. She did not argue this time, but couldn't help weeping. The coffin smelled like death, and she did not at first imagine that she could find rest there. But suddenly, as the sun rose, unconsciousness came upon her with a weight and surety that she had never experienced as a human. There were no nightmares.<p>

It was Jonathan who woke her, when evening came. She felt his hand against her shoulder and almost lashed out before she saw his face, startlingly familiar. "Come on," he said, "you can get up."

She did. The packed earth beneath her bare feet was cool and solid; she could almost feel the steady movement of the white roots which reached into it from outside the walls, growing with the stubborn assiduity of life. She looked at Jonathan. "I feel so _much, _now."

The careful, even concern on his face was so recognizable that she wanted, as she had often since the Count led her into that train compartment, to hold him close and pretend that nothing else existed. "I found it very difficult, in the first days. Is there anything I can do?"

She could not dissolve now. She couldn't. If she did then there would be nothing left of her, no way to survive the Count's taunts and violence with her mind still functioning. "Jonathan. He raped me last night. Did you know that? Did he tell you that was what he was going to do?"

Mina could see his neck tense, his eyes fix upon the wall as though not to look at her. "There are ways I _can _help you. That isn't one of them. Tell me what would make this easier on you now, and I will do whatever I can to help."

"Will he touch me again tonight?"

Jonathan inhaled sharply. "Probably not. He rarely takes the same one of us two nights in a row."

Mina felt the smile stealing across her face and the words slip out before she could regret them, only notice their bitter aftertaste on her tongue. "So I suppose you're all pleased that adding me reduces the burden on the rest of you?"

She had hurt him before, in the course of this horribly prolonged capture. Each time she regretted it. He was a captive as much as she was; Mina knew this. But resentment still rose up in her like bile, commensurate only with her guilt. He was her husband, obligated to protect her as she was obligated to protect him. And they had both failed in their obligations.

But his voice was careful, gentle. Even if she had angered him, he must not want to let her see that. "I don't think that's quite the effect. But I believe he'll let you rest tonight."

Mina thought, suddenly, of Jonathan in the hospital bed in Budapest, clasping her hands with his too-hot fingers. _Don't let him find me, _he begged her, delirious, _don't let him find Mina. _She twisted her skirt in her hands. "Could you take me to my room, the one you arranged for me?"

Relief seemed to spread through Jonathan, the tension in his frame slowly easing. "Yes," he told her, "I can do that."

As he led her through the castle, Mina tried to fix something in her mind of the sequence of halls and staircases and turns. She was startled anew at the strange alterations in her vision, the way she seemed to see differently now, without the need for light. How fascinated Professor Van Helsing would be, if she could have presented him with these observations of the undead condition.

She was struck, seeing the room again, by its simple quaintness, the contrast it made to the overwrought medievalism of the Count's bedchamber. Jonathan had indeed taken care to make it comforting to her, even if she had not been able fully to appreciate that fact in the drained exhaustion of her slow death.

"Can I keep things here?" she asked, turning to Jonathan, "Does he allow us to have our own possessions?"

He frowned, considering. "Not much, at least. I have clothes, but the women all share theirs, he'll probably want you to as well. The books I brought you are from his library, but we're permitted to read them, there's no restriction." He paused. "But you can go here, if he doesn't call you elsewhere, to be by yourself. I thought you might like that."

Warm sadness rose up in her. "I do. I appreciate it, though I don't know entirely what to say." She felt her fingers twining together, her old habit at moments of nervousness. "Would you - might you be able to sit with me here for a while now? I don't think that I can talk, but I would like very much not to be alone."

Jonathan nodded. They both sat down upon the bed in the twilight, not touching, not reaching for one another, silence heavy between their bodies.

Beneath the bed, she knew, her journal still lay, buried beneath a pile of dresses and petticoats. She held the thought of it close in her mind.

* * *

><p>A few nights later, the Count took her hunting with them.<p>

Mina at first felt disoriented by the wide expanse of starry sky above her, the beauty of the trees. It was nearly spring now, but some snow still gleamed silver on the high mountain. In those moments, as she took her first steps unaided in the open air since he had found her, Mina felt a diffuse, uncertain sense of hope burgeon up. The world still existed; it had not shrunk down into the closed prison of the Count's walls.

"Go," he commanded them, spreading his palms out like a king, "bring back a feast for us."

The five of them were dressed in black, standing before him like acolytes. Evidently this command was familiar to the others, for they scattered into the trees, Ileana taking Mina's wrist and leading her with them. The wind danced in her hair and skirt as she ran, her legs swifter and stronger over the uneven ground than she could ever have imagined. Although the shape of her body remained unchanging, Mina felt as though she was transforming into something new, something bestial and savage. There was exhilaration in it, and freedom.

Although animals crossed their path many times (deer, wolves, and smaller, scurrying things, each with their own scent, to Mina's changed senses, their own distinctive cries), it took a long time until they found a human, and they needed to venture close to the village to do so. Most of the houses, warm and bright, were barred to them by garlic and crucifixes which burned newly in Mina's vision, like gas flames. But one man leaned against a barn wall, smoking a pipe, his eyes distant and his throat unprotected by any sacred symbol.

"Him," Ecaterina hissed to the rest of them, who stood in a stand of trees, out of his clear vision.

For a moment, the horror of it did not reach Mina, only excitement and hunger and the longing for its satiation. She felt present with these women, with whom she had barely spoken, her sisters, her kin. And she was conscious no longer of Jonathan as the husband with whom she had pledged to spend the course of a human life, but as another member of this pack, close and yet unknowable.

And then the man, still unwitting, shifted his weight and sighed and showed himself unmistakably as a living human, with a family and a life and a future, and Mina knelt upon the cold ground and retched.

It was Jonathan who drew her up to her feet, held her shoulders as if at once to restrain her and to give her strength. She heeded him. She worked not to think, to sink into the energy of the hunt to the exclusion of all else.

They fell upon the man like wolves, grabbing at his limbs, Ileana forcing her fingers into his mouth as if to prevent him from audibly crying out. Mina felt him struggle against her, and the smell of his sweat roused longing in her abdomen. Her teeth were sharp in her mouth.

"Don't drink now," Ecaterina said in a carrying whisper, "not until he grants us permission."

Though the man at first struggled, soon he was enraptured and unresisting. Mina, who did not know yet how to do this to another, only watched while Adria spoke to him in Romanian, and Jonathan put his hand upon the man's sternum, as though fixing a cord there. They led him up the mountain, more slowly than they had come down it, back to where the Count still waited, regal in his dark cloak.

He was pleased when he saw what they had brought to him, his red lips spreading in a fearsome smile. And he took the man from them, long fingers tight in the badly cut, graying hair, and sunk his teeth into his neck.

The screams sank into the earth, unheard and unheeded.

When the Count had drunk his fill, he turned the man over to the rest of them, and what followed was to Mina afterwards a blur of force and pleasure, sinews straining and bones cracking and sweet blood filling her mouth. There was not enough for all of them, and she was left unsatisfied at the end, as the torn limbs of the man lay upon the ground and his heck lolled loosely from his broken neck.

And then it was done. She saw that the others around her were covered in blood, which made Jonathan look almost unrecognizable, frighteningly foreign. She realized that she was covered in blood as well. She felt the Count's gaze upon her, pleased and satisfied.

"Come here," he called to them, and she followed the others to him, followed them too when all of them, even Jonathan, knelt at his feet as if to receive a blessing. "You have done well," he told them, "it is a pleasure to watch you in your feasting." Mina, her head lowered and shame blooming her face, felt his hand in her hair, stroking her like an animal.

"We might use some of his clothing for Jonathan, with some mending," the Count continued musingly. Mina, startled at this change of topic, glanced up, and saw him caressing Jonathan's cheek. "Ecaterina, you will see what can be salvaged of them."

"Now. Mina."

She felt tension in her shoulders, and did not move.

"You will dispose of the body; I want you to spend time in consideration of every aspect of this act tonight. Strip off the clothing and leave the rest for the wolves, far enough from here that it will not be found. Adria will watch you, so that you are not tempted into anything foolish."

She was shaking, she thought.

"You thank me, now. For allowing you sustenance."

She looked up and met his gaze; he seemed to be amused. Unlike the rest of them, he was not covered in blood. He extended a hand to her. Feeling tears start in the back of her throat, she kissed his palm. "Thank you," she told him.

He and the others went inside, and left her to deal with the body alone. Adria stood several feet away from her, eyes downcast; her assigned position of guard seemed to be one she took on unwillingly. Mina felt very far from herself as she stripped the man's clothing from his body, trying to damage it as little as possible. Something crackled in the waistcoat pocket; paper. Without thinking, Mina took it out and unfolded it.

A note, written in German; a ticket stub; a printed list of dates and times places, precise to the minute.

Train tables.

Carefully, hoping that Adria did not see her, Mina slipped the scrap of paper into her bodice.

* * *

><p>In the next weeks, Mina spent all the time that she could collecting information. She did, as Jonathan had promised her, have a great deal of time to herself, without obligations, when the Count spent time with one of the others or shut himself in the library to work or took one of his unexplained trips out of the castle. During some of this time she found herself incapable of anything, her mind so loud and frantic that she had to sit as still as possible to quiet it. But at other times she was able to research, to turn her imagination towards the possibility of escape. She searched through the Count's books for information about the geography of the land immediately surrounding them, the location of the nearest roads and towns and railway stations, and copied that information, along with the list of train tables she had found, into her journal, in the shorthand so layered with old familiarity that she wanted to weep. And she spun out plans, uncertain but promising.<p>

The steadily filling pages of her journal gave her a new sense of safety, as though in creating these regular lines of text, she might also be able to recreate the life that he had taken from her, the surety of her mind and body and will. It was a meager thing, but she held to it, to the ink in the creases of her fingers and her mind's continued ability to think and plan and memorize. She was reciting the new train table to herself, trying to turn the names and numbers into a litany as she once had at home in England. She could feel the possibility of movement, of change, progression forward.

And a way out.

But one night the Count, as should have expected he would, found her writing in it. Hearing the door creak open, she turned quickly to put the journal away, but he saw it before she could do so.

"How fascinating," he said, "it seems you have found a pastime for yourself. Would you care to share this with me, Mina?"

For a moment, panic seized her, for there was no way he could possibly interpret these escape plans as anything other than what they were. But then she remembered the curved characters of the shorthand. _He cannot read it, _she told herself, and handed the journal over with trepidation and reluctance.

Mina thought of Jonathan's account of his time here, long ago, his letters to her curling to ash at the Count's hand. How frail paper was, as a tool for survival.

She saw him frown. "You disappoint me, though perhaps not surprise. You know how disrespectful it is to keep secrets from the one who provides and cares for you?"

Mina would keep her voice even, if she did nothing else. "I keep a journal. I have kept a journal long before I met you. There is nothing secret in that."

"Then I suppose you would have no objection to my calling Jonathan here to have him transcribe into the Latin alphabet those things that you have taken such care to encode?"

She looked away from him. The Count closed the journal, holding it between his palms. "I will take this, I think, and decide later what to do with it. I don't want to see you writing again, Mina." He smiled. "No ink stains on your fingers. I see I have been neglecting you too much, to leave you the idleness to foment conspiraces. I will be ceratin to occupy more of your time and energy in the future."

Rage churned in her like the tides.

* * *

><p>"Undress him."<p>

She was in the Count's bedchamber, looking at Jonathan, and the command caught at her belly, twisting in shock. "What do you mean?"

Jonathan was silent.

The Count's voice was easy, regular. "I've noticed that you still seem to have some difficulty doing anything other than reluctantly submitting when I touch you; I want to see if you might behave differently with your husband. And I'm certain that he would value the chance, however brief, to touch you again."

She saw Jonathan flinch, and felt what seemed to be dizziness, for all that she thought that sensation had left her with her mortality. She lowered her eyes.

"This will not be the first time I've watched the two of you," the Count added conversationally, "though, of course, you were not aware of it previously. There is no privacy here, however much you may have learned to depend upon it in England. Go on, or I will use hypnosis on whichever of you resists, and I promise that you will find that a much less pleasant process."

Mina felt cold drip down her neck and pool in her collarbones. She laid a palm against Jonathan's chest. He met her eyes and nodded, infinitesimally.

She kissed him, feeling his cold mouth against hers, her tongue between his lips. She began to work loose the buttons of his shirt, as slowly as she dared. The air was still. Her husband. She could do this.

Jonathan's shirt was off, and his chest bare. She began to work on unfastening his trousers. He was aroused. Suddenly, she could have choked on shame.

She felt him as still, unparticipating, and the fact frightened her, as though her hands were causing him some injury. At then at once, when he was naked before her, Mina felt Jonathan's hands settle on her waist, his mouth at her shoulder. She clung to his ribs and sobbed, in desire and grief, as he kissed her body, hastily unlacing her dress as he did so.

"Good," the Count said quietly, "keep going. Touch him, Mina."

She did. They both did as he told them to. She found herself again on her back, and looking up she could see not only Jonathan's face, but the Count's, his eyes upon her prone body. The Count touched the back of Jonathan's neck. "Now," he said, "I want you to hurt her."

Jonathan turned towards him; the Count handed him a knife.

Mina screamed at the pain, and could not stop herself.

* * *

><p>It was done, and they were edging near to dawn. Mina curled herself up, and did not care if she was laughed at for that. Jonathan lay on the other side of the bed; she could not see him, and did not want to, did not think she could bear to. The Count lay between them, relaxed, satiated.<p>

_Let me die, _Mina thought, _let me die, let me die. _It was a litany, as if to replace the lost train tables. She couldn't remember them anymore; it had been too long. Her mind was slipping away from her, and soon there would be nothing left. She could almost understand how Jonathan had gotten to this state of nuetral passivity, after so long in this place.

She realized, after several minutes of stillness, that the Count was asleep. The idea was first humorous to her - _so he is not so omnipotent or inhuman after all, if he lets himself lapse into rest after these sorts of exertions - _and then, as she recalled the bloody knife still lying at the foot of the mattress, suddenly promising.

Perhaps it would not work so well as a wooden stake, but surely beheading could have some effectiveness as a mode of dispatch. She sat up, slowly and quietly, and picked up the knife, saw the Count's body beneath her, vulnerable in its stillness.

But Jonathan's voice rang out in the silence, "Mina, stop!"

Everything was fast then: the Count awoke, saw the knife in her hand, grabbed her and twisted her wrist until she dropped it, pushed her against the wall. His hand was at her throat, tight enough to bruise, but she hardly cared then about the pain - her eyes were fixed on Jonathan, who was trying not to look at her.

"Coward!" she screamed at him, "Traitor!"

The Count tightened his fingers. "Hardly; I think it is rather you who are the traitor here. Did you not pledge your obedience to me?"

She didn't want to listen to his lectures any longer; she had heard enough of them over the past several weeks. If only Jonathan would meet her eyes, if only he would feel shame, or guilt, or anger. If he only would do anything but sit and watch, immured in his own complicity.

"Focus!" the Count's voice was sharp and cutting, "I will not have you slipping away from me by ignoring everything I say to you. I expected better from you than this betrayal."

Mina found she could still speak, though her voice rasped from the clench of his fingers at her throat. "You expected to tame me. Perhaps you misjudged how sharp your falcon's talons were, just this once."

And then he put his other hand, too, around her neck and, though she no longer needed breath to live, the terror of it overwhelmed her.

* * *

><p>He brought her to a small, windowless room with no furniture but a single, dust-filled bedstead, and he locked her in. He left her there for night upon night upon night, returning only to hurt or rape or lecture her. He did not give her any victims to drink from.<p>

She was angry, for the first few nights, and held to that even as the hunger mounted, turning her face away from him when he came to her, refusing to listen to him. But she could not sustain it; it faded from her, as her body grew weaker again and her loneliness deepened. She began listening. What he told her began to seem more reasonable.

He made her beg him for her freedom, for sustenance, for the cessation of pain. The first few times he told her that he did not believe her, that she was not truthfully abasing herself before him, and he did not grant what she begged him for. She did not know how long it was until he did decide to let her out, until he gave her a human to drink from.

When he took her hand and led her out of the locked room, among his wives and Jonathan, Mina felt nothing. She was focused upon the feeling of the Count's hand on hers, upon any hint he might be giving her of his intentions or desires to which she might be able to respond. He brought her to sit down betweenn Ileana and Adria, and she remained there, hands folded in her lap, long after he had left the room.

Dimly, at the edges of her vision, she saw Jonathan stand, walk towards her. He placed something upon her lap, and then wordlessly left the room.

It was the journal the Count had taken from her. She opened it, feeling something in her come alight at the sight of the writing, at the steps her mind had to take to decipher it. And there, upon the inside cover, Jonathan had written, in his own, carefully formed shorthand -

_Hold on. Be brave. I love you._


End file.
